Creality Ender 3 S1 Pro

Purchased a new E3S1 Pro off Amazon, the 1st one arrived as an open box resealed by Amazon. After a short discussion with CS they sent me another one. The 2nd one was in a sealed box and didn’t like it was a return.

Went together rather easily, installed the hotend on the gantry, bolted the gantry to the base, plugged in all the cables. Had to tighten up the rollers on the build plate so it wouldn’t wobble. Plugged it in and set the Z-offset and leveled the bed. Printed the rabbit on the sd card and it came out just fine. Sliced the rabbit using Prusa Slicer using the included S1 Pro profile the printed rabbit looked about the same as the 1st. Downloaded the Creality Slicer for Linux my oh my it was one of the most confusing slicers I have ever tried to use. Just downloaded it out of curiosity anyway. I’m happy with Prusa Slicer.

The touch screen is very responsive but the UI could sure use some help. To find the preheat you need to go about 3 menus deep, when there’s plenty of room on the Home Screen to at least put a menu item for it. There isn’t any logical layout.

I leveled the bed manually then ran the automatic level to create a mesh. I then put M420 S1 Z10 in my startup to read the mesh. As far as I can tell this is working just fine.
Flashed the latest version of Octopi on a new 32 gb SD card and put it in my Raspberry Pi +3 B connected it up to the S1 and it connected fine. I normally control my printers with Octoprint but occasionally if I’m by the printer I will use the printers screen. Not that simple now I can start, pause, stop prints with Octoprint but the screen on the printer doesn’t change and at times it’s locked up and doesn’t respond. I flashed to the latest version of firmware from the Creality web site and flashed both the screen and printer. Same issue.
From reading post here it seems that a warped bed is a big issue with the S1 I must be lucky and got a good one. Using the Bed Virtualizer add-on in Octprint the bed was the flattest of any of my machines using the same add-on. The 2 left corners were a bit high so I tweaked those to corner screws a bit and ran the test again. Did this several times till the corners came out in the green. I have a big print on the bed now, the 1st layer looked good so I have high hopes.

It was a 10 hour print and last night the filament ran out, discovered this morning when I woke up. U put some new filament in and pressed continue on the screen (had my fingers crossed that it would work. Octoprint had no idea the filament had run out.) the printhead sat there for a bit then went to the back corner purged some filament and. continued printing.

So far I’m liking it hope the warm fuzzy feeling last and a month from now I’m wondering why I bought this. At least the initial experience with the S1 Pro was 10 times better than with my Soval Sv04 which didn’t work out of the box.​

Note: Creality’s directions for updating the LCD screen differer depending on where you read them. The 1st one I followed said to copy the private folder on to a formatted 8gb sd card. I wondered at the time why there was also a DWIN_SET directory in the archive too. With some research I found that this is the correct way to do it.
Format a 8gb SD card to Fat32
Copy DWIN_SET
private
directories to the SD card, put the sd card in the sd card slot on LCD motherboard, with the cable connected turn on the printer. The update will take for 2-5 minutes and when done the Creality logo will appear as the screen boots. Power down, removed SD card replace the back and cable. You are nor ready to update the printer firmware.

I had an Ender S1 and was initially very pleased with it. I too was lucky not to get a warped bed. But the constant level of fighting small fires daily to solve yet a new issue really got on my nerves. Mine could not print anymore after 3 months. Ender’s help service was zero. Amazon intervened and I was refunded after sending it back. In hindsight, when I see the print quality of my Prusa now, it’s much better and no hassle in comparison to the Ender.